Last week, a new study confirmed something essential about women, something that refuses to budge, even though many say it’s long past time. Professors at Trinity College in Connecticut analyzed the numbers of Americans unaffiliated to any religion. While the number of male nonbelievers was rocketing, the overall totals were slowed by women hitching themselves to the anchor of faith: “Gender difference is a brake on the growth of the No Religion population,” says the study, which found that 19 percent of men were no longer denizens of a religious America, while only 12 percent of women live outside the faithful fold. In the past, one could say that women tended the hearth, and men participated in the marketplace. But today?
These statistics are consistent with a recent Pew Forum summary of religion in America. In fact, a researcher at Pew told me that studies going back as far as he can remember have shown this discrepancy, and reaching back into history, even prehistory, we find the same story. And yet, major religions—put down your crystals and pocket those pentagrams, ladies—have always favored men. Not a single major faith is led by members of its female flock, and the more deeply adherent a religious group becomes, the less freedom it offers its women, not to mention power. It's hard not to compare women sticking with faith to wives confined to bad marriages: They’re so committed to the institution that they'll willingly shrink under mistreatment just to maintain their own status quo.
Researchers have offered many theories about why women are religious in greater numbers than men. Most are inconclusive; all are fascinating. Some investigators locate the engine of belief in our very brain chemistry, and find the female brain far more apt to sense the divine. Canadian cognitive neuroscientist Michael Persinger, the reigning cleric of the neurology of belief, has asserted that the “experience” of God, or feeling the presence of the divine, is literally built into the brain, specifically in the limbic system or the temporal lobe. When Persinger applied magnetic fields over the temporal lobe to mimic the reaction he found in electromagnetic studies, the gender difference was “quite impressive”—that women sensed the presence of a “sentient being” in greater numbers than men.
“Belief,” Persinger told me, “relates more to how the person relates, interprets, and reconstructs the experience.” In other words, even when men and women had the same response in the brain, women were more apt to attribute it to something divine, “out of body.” Other scientists have found these limbic tendencies particularly pronounced in adolescent girls, concurrent with the final stages of brain development. As Barry Kosmin, a coauthor of the new Trinity College study says, “That's why when anybody sees the Virgin Mary, it's a couple of young girls on a mountainside in Southern Europe.” (Nota bene: This week, Sam Harris—who gained fame by authoring The End of Faith but is by training a neuroscientist—released his new findings on the neural correlates of belief. He told me in this case he found no difference between the workings of the female and male brain.)
Some researchers hypothesize that women are hardwired to believe because of evolutionary imperatives. Belief in God—or the Mount Olympus ensemble cast, or a phalanx of wood spirits, and so on—has long been connected with tribal ritual, and formed the center of communities. Women relied on these communities for the survival of their children, while men were off spearing buffalo, pillaging neighboring settlements—or whatever the caveman business trip furnished. The relationship between belonging and belief is an ancient one. It may have resulted in the development of certain alleles connected to a sense of God, or at least a commitment to religion.
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Comments
why more women than men are religious
By: AlanDownunder | Thu, 12/31/2009 - 04:58
Because religious belief comforts the oppressed.
Are We In the Closet?
By: darwins_secret_... | Fri, 10/16/2009 - 19:26
As a closeted atheist, I am in a very sticky situation. All of my family members and best friends are deeply religious believers. Once when I questioned Jesus' holiness, my parents threatened to cancel Christmas forever. So what could I do? I repented, and pay lip service to all of their preaching. When someone asks me about my religious beliefs, I say Christian, even though I am an atheist. I don't feel like I am entirely lying, either, because I was raised in a Christian culture. Some of the beliefs professed by my family as God's edicts are great, regardless of where they came from. I once bought Dawkins' God Delusion in college, only to immediately take it back to the store, terrified of what my family would say if they found it among my things when I moved back home. When I think about the future, I fret a little about the fact that I want to marry an atheist in a non-religious setting, and want our children to be raised free to choose their own beliefs. I worry about other kids and parents alienating my hypothetical future family because of our beliefs.
Maybe, like me, women are afraid to speak up because of the pressure to stick to the status quo, regardless of what our head is telling us. It isn't easy or pretty to live this kind of life, but it is safe. In some deeply troubling way, it is secure. And that's still very important for most women. "Religious freedom" seems not to apply to those who don't believe.
Sorry ladies, He's just not that into you...
By: MrJM | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 17:06
Q: Why Do More Women Than Men Still Believe in God?
A: "I know that if I just love Him enough, I can change him."
-- MrJM
This article seems to
By: Kit-Kat | Wed, 10/14/2009 - 16:41
This article seems to conflate believing in God with participating in organized religion, when, of course, the two are not the same, and her sloppy equivocation makes it hard to accept her argument. Does belief in a divine being cause unequal treatment of women, or do people use (and pervert) religious organizations to impose and justify unequal treatment and enforce gender roles? Do "religions" that are not focused on worship of a divine being, such as some eastern religions or polytheistic religions that include female deities, produce more egalitarian societies? Are atheist societies actually more egalitarian?
Maybe someone will write a truly interesting and informative article on this subject--but this isn't it.
thanks for such insight!
By: capizana | Tue, 10/13/2009 - 12:03
I'll continue to pray for you all anyway! God bless you all!
Oh, please...
By: nagatuki | Tue, 10/13/2009 - 08:54
Capizana, you and others are only playing into the point of this article, aren't you?
I find I am against the tide - I'm a 30yo woman with no belief system, and yet there's no "emptiness" of atheism in my life - that's a retarded argument made by illogical people.
Yeah, I'm calling you out; if you can go on about trinities of male gods and magical space beings, expecting respect while at the same time insulting people who don't adhere to your antiquated thought system, I can insult you right back.
Religion is, as someone put it, "an elixir when you're weak," and who's weaker than Woman in society?
Perhaps it is that women
By: capizana | Mon, 10/12/2009 - 17:42
Perhaps it is that women really are smarter and see the truth of an Almighty Creator. They haven't fallen for the empty nothingness which is all that atheism can offer anyone. When you open your hearts and minds to the Truth of the Holy Trinity, you will realize that His love transcends whatever you may believe with your limited human perceptions. Don't make the mistake of equating man's dogma with true faith, which is based on eternal wisdom from the Lord.
I didn't always believe in God.
By: nat-tastic | Mon, 10/12/2009 - 15:41
I was raised by a former Catholic, and as anyone who has experienced this can attest, it was an upbringing which emphasized the importance of questioning organized religion. So I grew up without going to church, basically without any sort of organized religion, aside from the unavoidable exposure to suburban Christianity- for which I maintained a complete contempt throughout high school.
And then a few years later, something changed. It's difficult to say what, but I suddenly started to feel so much more connected to the universe- and to feel the presence of some sort of a universal energy to which I could only give the name of God. I still feel that today, a few years later (I'm 24... and I'm aware of how "Oprah" this sounds. For the record, I've never been a fan). At the same time, I started to feel like I would actually want to have children- whereas I had always hated the idea, before.
Maybe it has something to do with the awareness that a woman needs to have in order to take care of a family or a community. If you are geared to perceiving the interconnectedness of things in a spiritual way, it makes you all the more interested in being a part of that web and caring for it. Thoughts?
Thanks for telling me what to believe, Double X!
By: groundhog | Mon, 10/12/2009 - 15:13
I'm so glad you're looking out for me, Double X, since you clearly know what's best for me. My silly female brain was enjoying the additional dimension my faith adds to my life, and the intellectual challenges of tackling ontological questions in community with other believers, and the joy of worship. I thought it was great that this pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-war feminist and her husband could find a place in a mainstream Christian denomination. Whoops! I was oppressing myself and I didn't even realize it!
I'm not saying that everyone should believe in God. I am all too aware of the terrible things done around the world in the name of religion. Belief, like courage and honesty, isn't inherently good or bad, and shouldn't be dismissed across the board as wrong for everybody.
p.s. The Church of the Brethren, despite the goofy name, regularly has female moderators (one-year term, equivalent to president).
Religion Gives Context To Lifelong Self-Doubt
By: nonprophet | Mon, 10/12/2009 - 13:50
In some ways, human existence is all about self-doubt, for all of us, all the time. Yet it may well be that women are more practiced and pervasive vehicles of this self-doubt than men, as boys are generally taught from birth to reach for the stars, dream big, and that they have as much potential as anyone. Girls only get that if they are blessed with supportive parents, and even then, their native self-doubt is reinforced constantly by assaults on self-confidence from peers, media, and a society that constantly links a woman's worth to her appearance and the crass utility of her youthful sexual appeal.
Religion is often fully complicit in this reinforcement, generally preoccupied as it is with externally imposed morality, much of it based on patriarchal notions of sexual 'purity', the link between a woman's reproductive capacity and her spiritual value, and of course the more fundamental idea that we are subordinate to a greater consciousness (which itself supports ideas of submission to which women in countless cultures are pushed from birth; after all, what bigger daddy figure is there than God?).
For humans in general and women in particular, religion provides contextual justification for that self-doubt at the same time as it assuages the pain of it by providing a soothing source of reassurance and power through piety and self-righteousness.
Of course, as the article notes, there are a host of community and family issues which tend to be more important to women, and for which religion can provide useful support, but on a personal level, I believe religion speaks to an inculcated capacity for self-questioning that women often have in greater measure than men.